That's good for CS and CE related work. Too many people went there not because they liked programming or engineering but because they wanted to get rich fast.
Hopefully this means the clogged up job market will stop being the clown circus it is now.
Getting rich fast, and doing what you love in your spare time, rather than pretending you love your work, which no one does, sounds perfectly coherent to me.
No, because they are not the people who love to do it in their spare time. They never do it in their spare time, because they don't love the activity that much.
The jobs probably aren't disappearing because of AI but because of previous over-hiring and a slowing economy. It seems like a cover story to push people into accepting underemployment.
Kids who used to study electrical engineering, or mechanical engineering or go into finance and accounting, decided all to major in computer science instead, because if you are going to be an office drone, why not be an office drone in the field that everyone is getting 6-figure starting salaries in?
Surely the overabundance of graduates in CS played into the current situation.
Can they afford a middle class lifestyle with just 100k? My understanding of costs of living in California puts people in that range in the working class with a very low rate of savings (no hope to escape into middle class even with compounding) or they could afford a small family and no savings.
What does the alternative look like though? Sure tech companies pay engineers well, but there's plenty of other jobs requiring a college degree that don't reach that salary level.
… but not in most cities in CA is the OP’s point, actually not even is most large cities on either coast. Which isn’t to say it’s not possible, you could definitely live well elsewhere on that salary but there is an obsession with coastal cities.
If I were an 18 year old financially savvy person making $100k a year in California, I would probably take home about $70k. About $1k, maybe $2k at the highest would be set aside for rent with roommates because I'm 18 and there's very little upside to me having my own apartment yet.
Groceries here in Finland are more expensive than I remember them ever being in the United States, and so based on my current budget I would set aside about $300 per month for food for myself. Maybe $400 if I wanted to go to restaurants more often. $500 is reasonable too. Over $1000 and you are deluding yourself or need to buy a rice cooker.
I'm still saving about $40,000 per yer, over half of my take home pay, conservatively. I'd consider that really good! What I do with that is my business, but on one extreme, if I threw all of that directly into my retirement fund, at a 7% real rate of return (reasonable given past index fund performance, already adjusted for inflation), I would have roughly $1 million in today's money by the time I'm 65.
But of course that's ignoring the real elephant in the room, which is that wages are famously sticky, and getting paid $100k by 18 is probably the single most surefire way to get paid $1 million by 30. The kinds of things and the kind of person you have to be to pull that off are where that price signal is coming from, and so I take away from this that, as is often the case in finance, these kids are probably not going to have to worry about that much money-wise even if they don't stick to a strictly calibrated plan.
I actually don't, those are the only two expenses my family has. Come to think of it those are the only two expenses I've ever had. I guess if we lived in the countryside we'd need a car, so, three expense categories total.
But alright, gather all of these other miscellaneous expenses up and take out another $10k per year to cover them. You still have $30,000 left if you're paying $2k a month on rent.
You don't pay for utilities, or public transport? Your family has never had to pay for clothes, or school books, or healthcare expenses (I know those aren't completely socialized in Finland)?
I agree an 18-year-old earning $100k is doing great even in the most expensive parts of California, but you don't sound like you've ever actually had to think through a household budget.
I would think that there would still be other expenses in some form:
- Utilities on shared apartment with roommates (unless you are lumping this into rent)
- Doctors co-pays (or the money to spend out of pocket until you meet your deductible, depending on your health insurance)
If you have a car,
- car insurance
- gas
- car maintenance costs such as 6 month services
At 18? Who is starting a family at 18 years old in that climate?
Claude Opus's Fermi estimate of the number of 18 year olds, making at least $100,000 a year, in California, with children, to be about 8 people. Not 8 thousand, not 8 hundred. Eight. Single digit. In a state of 40 million people.
I'll give you even odds that the number is within 4 orders of magnitude of correct. That is to say, in the year of 2025, there are/were fewer than 100,000 18 year olds, resident in the state of California, who have at least one child, and who made over $100,000 that year. If you prove me wrong I'll happily concede the point.
The demographics stats say no. It is not the job of the individual to engage in self destructive life plans because the previous generations have eaten the future and wrapped in nostalgia extruded plans think they can now comand them around like plantation owners cattle.
When computers get much better at doing stuff I'd think more people would want to work with computers, this to me seems obvious. There will be even more computers and more people needed to deploy them and operate them. And by the time that is automated, most other jobs that require physical jobs will have robots doing them anyway, so it really is hard for me to understand that as computers get better people predict less people will work with them. Better tool = more of that tool. Paperclip would also say that over a long period of time all of our energy and available space would go to more and more compute. It's hard to think anything else is safer than computer.
Isnt this healthy? Decades of single-minded idea that the only progress is college degree formula "because stats shows college degrees is indicator of whatever progress metric" has led to massive personal debt and unsuitable - both personal and societal - careers.
Isnt it healthy that people/society dont think there's a singles formula for success?
I don’t think robots will be replacing a toilet or retrofitting PEX in an old home anytime soon. Though it might be nice for the drywall guys to have robots make the cuts instead of the plumbers.
Welding is supposed to be future-proof? At $90+/hour for unionized labor? Don't make me laugh. Look at the work Boston Dynamics has already done with neural networks and tell me that we're not going to see robots doing perfect welds in any space a human could reach, 24/7 around the clock without any need for rest breaks.
> The cobots have already begun production performing high-volume and repetitive welds, but the technology still lags behind humans in artistic quality and problem-solving ability.
AI reduces the repetitive work humans have to do, freeing up our minds for creative problem solving - and creative problem solving is also amplified by having an AI to dialogue with.
Those rates are nothing to sneeze at, but the work is often hard work out in the beating sun (not everybody is installing data centers in air conditioning). And the work takes a toll on your body.
Those are certainly not numbers that would make people genuinely qualified for software jobs think once let alone twice.
What? Where? All the welding jobs I have ever known were terrible for your body. Between the exposure to high UV, all the bits of toxic crap that you are breathing/ingesting, and the noise from heavy machinery, it's quite bad. And that's not to mention just the baseline damage from lugging and hauling and hefting heavy pieces of metal.
My grandfather did welding for Bethlehem Steel as did my father. My grandfather died from a weird cancer from all the crap he was exposed to. My father quit working at the mill precisely because it was doing so much damage just by wear and tear. They both made a point to make sure that my job would be based around my brain and not my body.
Electricians, by contrast, at least don't have anywhere near the same level of exposure to toxic crap.
Probably the same way they’d view the young tech startup billionaire. They’d understand they’re just seeing snapshots of an industry they don’t fully know so they’d avoid generalizing to “all young tech workers are billionaires”.
Why you’d think you can characterize an entire industry based on a few snapshots is not clear to me.
A few more things I’d add to the health risks of welding: the inevitable toxic crap on the hands even just by taking off the protective equipment, or the occasionally extremely uncomfortable body posture that needs to be maintained for hours on end while welding. And there are more extreme welding environments that put almost any job on earth to shame, like hyperbaric welding.
Over years things add up. If office work is hard on the body for too much sitting which is natural and fine is smaller doses, imagine work where even the small exposures are terribly bad.
Source: only welded once in my life but worked for a company that did a lot of it, from the mountain top to the bottom of the sea. All the safety avoids acute issues but the chronic ones will build up.
So, your hands have no oil or dirt on them after working a welding shift? Wow, I'd love to take a tour of your workplace.
Even if you've got protection on, you still get exposed little by little. If someone is welding next to you on a site, you get exposed. If you have slag, you are breathing vaporized chemicals and heavy metal ions unless you a wearing a closed system breather. Any solvents or fluids tend to be some level of toxic. etc.
Welding is more than just putting rod to metal. You cut things. You grind things. You apply chemicals in preparation. Nobody is dressed in an environmental hazard suit all day--lack of mobility and peripheral vision is its own industrial hazard.
If you're covered in grime at the end of the day, well, all that crap is toxic to some degree.
True, didn’t think about grime like that. I’d be curious to see actual health outcomes comparing the risks of a sedentary occupation with one that has some toxic exposure.
> My grandfather did welding for Bethlehem Steel as did my father.
A company from 1857 that scarcely advanced it's Health & Safety practices.
> And that's not to mention just the baseline damage from lugging and hauling and hefting heavy pieces of metal.
Exactly - modern metal fabrication workers, fitters, turners, machinists, et al use forklifts, overhead cranes, eye protection, breathing rigs that filter out toxins and cool the face, and essentially work smart .. and that's been my experience since I first TA'd in a mining locomotive shed back in the late 1970s.
You can see examples of this in the heavy industry repair domain here:
> Even worse, he's using old school stick welding.
Can you show an example of that? (You linked to him using a needle gun not a stick welder)
He's got top of the range spooled feed welders and does jobs at a scale that take hundreds of metres of feed .. these are not the jobs you spend all day swapping sticks for.
If you watched more of the channel you might pick up a lot of discussion about what is and isn't toxic, what are safe and unsafe practices.
"AI" might be the given reason but I feel like this is an expected correction regardless. Ideally people would gravitate towards jobs that match their interests and talents. But our education systems, governments and economies have been pushing more people into thought work even if that's not where their talents lie. This has actually made a lot of the trades very lucrative for the few that remained. Of course, that won't last either, though.
The correction I'm waiting for is the one where we realise we don't need to work twice as many hours as they did a couple of generations ago. Somehow an entire generation was convinced that going to work for someone else was a privilege and working for yourself at home doing cooking, cleaning, maintenance etc was subjugation. A lot of people see the benefit of working for themselves now (they call it "hustling") but still fail to see what's right under their noses as they order the third takeaway of the week.
But shortages of necessities are used to ensure that peer competition remains stiff enough to keep us outbidding each other for housing, etc necessitating optimizing for income, necessitating working more hours, for all but a lucky few.
That's good for CS and CE related work. Too many people went there not because they liked programming or engineering but because they wanted to get rich fast.
Hopefully this means the clogged up job market will stop being the clown circus it is now.
And as an educator, I also look forward to more classes where people genuinely want to learn the material and aren't just in it for the money.
Getting rich fast, and doing what you love in your spare time, rather than pretending you love your work, which no one does, sounds perfectly coherent to me.
I've always found design to be deeply fulfilling work, not something I need to pretend to love.
I love my work personally.
No, because they are not the people who love to do it in their spare time. They never do it in their spare time, because they don't love the activity that much.
The jobs probably aren't disappearing because of AI but because of previous over-hiring and a slowing economy. It seems like a cover story to push people into accepting underemployment.
Kids who used to study electrical engineering, or mechanical engineering or go into finance and accounting, decided all to major in computer science instead, because if you are going to be an office drone, why not be an office drone in the field that everyone is getting 6-figure starting salaries in? Surely the overabundance of graduates in CS played into the current situation.
CTE/Vocational education leading to underemployment is some straight up Boomer propaganda.
A 18 year old who goes from graduation to the electrical union will make $60k in year one.
Sure, not the total comp package that those in tech covet but have you looked at median income?
Can they afford a middle class lifestyle with just 100k? My understanding of costs of living in California puts people in that range in the working class with a very low rate of savings (no hope to escape into middle class even with compounding) or they could afford a small family and no savings.
What does the alternative look like though? Sure tech companies pay engineers well, but there's plenty of other jobs requiring a college degree that don't reach that salary level.
I didn’t say that there was an alternative. Just that 100k doesn’t make them rich.
Apple, Tesla et al tell you you're not rich, but you can be if you want to be. Learned helplessness.
… but not in most cities in CA is the OP’s point, actually not even is most large cities on either coast. Which isn’t to say it’s not possible, you could definitely live well elsewhere on that salary but there is an obsession with coastal cities.
Are you accounting for debt? I hope people are also ditching massive student debt on top of widening career options
Outside of the Bay Area, sure - California is a pretty big place, and trades are in demand all over.
Will they make the 100k in the lower income parts of Cali though?
There's this really innovative practice done called commuting.
It can take 16 hours to drive across California.
I can’t believe you’re trying to be sarcastically condescending with this kind of comment. It’s difficult to respect that.
[dead]
Let's run the numbers.
If I were an 18 year old financially savvy person making $100k a year in California, I would probably take home about $70k. About $1k, maybe $2k at the highest would be set aside for rent with roommates because I'm 18 and there's very little upside to me having my own apartment yet.
Groceries here in Finland are more expensive than I remember them ever being in the United States, and so based on my current budget I would set aside about $300 per month for food for myself. Maybe $400 if I wanted to go to restaurants more often. $500 is reasonable too. Over $1000 and you are deluding yourself or need to buy a rice cooker.
I'm still saving about $40,000 per yer, over half of my take home pay, conservatively. I'd consider that really good! What I do with that is my business, but on one extreme, if I threw all of that directly into my retirement fund, at a 7% real rate of return (reasonable given past index fund performance, already adjusted for inflation), I would have roughly $1 million in today's money by the time I'm 65.
But of course that's ignoring the real elephant in the room, which is that wages are famously sticky, and getting paid $100k by 18 is probably the single most surefire way to get paid $1 million by 30. The kinds of things and the kind of person you have to be to pull that off are where that price signal is coming from, and so I take away from this that, as is often the case in finance, these kids are probably not going to have to worry about that much money-wise even if they don't stick to a strictly calibrated plan.
I'm not saying an 18 year couldn't easily live on $100k / year. They certainly can, but you do have expenses besides rent and groceries you know.
I actually don't, those are the only two expenses my family has. Come to think of it those are the only two expenses I've ever had. I guess if we lived in the countryside we'd need a car, so, three expense categories total.
But alright, gather all of these other miscellaneous expenses up and take out another $10k per year to cover them. You still have $30,000 left if you're paying $2k a month on rent.
You don't pay for utilities, or public transport? Your family has never had to pay for clothes, or school books, or healthcare expenses (I know those aren't completely socialized in Finland)?
I agree an 18-year-old earning $100k is doing great even in the most expensive parts of California, but you don't sound like you've ever actually had to think through a household budget.
I would think that there would still be other expenses in some form: - Utilities on shared apartment with roommates (unless you are lumping this into rent) - Doctors co-pays (or the money to spend out of pocket until you meet your deductible, depending on your health insurance)
If you have a car, - car insurance - gas - car maintenance costs such as 6 month services
You don't have utilities? You don't have a computer? You don't wear clothes? You don't go anywhere further than you can walk?
They’ll way to start families, not live with roommates.
At 18? Who is starting a family at 18 years old in that climate?
Claude Opus's Fermi estimate of the number of 18 year olds, making at least $100,000 a year, in California, with children, to be about 8 people. Not 8 thousand, not 8 hundred. Eight. Single digit. In a state of 40 million people.
Then what is this 100K good for? Paying for food and living with roommates? This is not great.
I make >100k, I own 5 appartments and 1.5 houses but I live in a flat, just because it's better than living alone.
That’s also because it’s just making that number up.
I guarantee you there are more than that just from trust funders/people working for their parents and religious enough to start families early.
Stop pasting LLM slop here.
I'll give you even odds that the number is within 4 orders of magnitude of correct. That is to say, in the year of 2025, there are/were fewer than 100,000 18 year olds, resident in the state of California, who have at least one child, and who made over $100,000 that year. If you prove me wrong I'll happily concede the point.
lol. +- 4 orders of magnitude? You’re not even making a point.
The demographics stats say no. It is not the job of the individual to engage in self destructive life plans because the previous generations have eaten the future and wrapped in nostalgia extruded plans think they can now comand them around like plantation owners cattle.
And with living conditions like that, I fully understand why they don't.
When computers get much better at doing stuff I'd think more people would want to work with computers, this to me seems obvious. There will be even more computers and more people needed to deploy them and operate them. And by the time that is automated, most other jobs that require physical jobs will have robots doing them anyway, so it really is hard for me to understand that as computers get better people predict less people will work with them. Better tool = more of that tool. Paperclip would also say that over a long period of time all of our energy and available space would go to more and more compute. It's hard to think anything else is safer than computer.
Isnt this healthy? Decades of single-minded idea that the only progress is college degree formula "because stats shows college degrees is indicator of whatever progress metric" has led to massive personal debt and unsuitable - both personal and societal - careers.
Isnt it healthy that people/society dont think there's a singles formula for success?
Blue collar is the only bastion safe from AI. As we office workers lose our jobs we need to retrain
Spoken like someone who's never been inside an assembly line.
I don’t think robots will be replacing a toilet or retrofitting PEX in an old home anytime soon. Though it might be nice for the drywall guys to have robots make the cuts instead of the plumbers.
It depends on the blue collar job, but electrician, plumber, roofer, all seem pretty safe from automation for a while at least.
Wait for AI-powered robots in the field.
Welding is supposed to be future-proof? At $90+/hour for unionized labor? Don't make me laugh. Look at the work Boston Dynamics has already done with neural networks and tell me that we're not going to see robots doing perfect welds in any space a human could reach, 24/7 around the clock without any need for rest breaks.
https://youtu.be/HYwekersccY?si=p5BZaGOUQJsqd1f_
What's the case for optimism here?
Arc time is 10-20% of welders workday.
A dozen students
A full dozen of them
Would love a source on the $80.50. BLS has welding wages much lower. Also, all the “easy” jobs will be automated. Tough/uncomfortable to the humans
> The cobots have already begun production performing high-volume and repetitive welds, but the technology still lags behind humans in artistic quality and problem-solving ability.
AI reduces the repetitive work humans have to do, freeing up our minds for creative problem solving - and creative problem solving is also amplified by having an AI to dialogue with.
I’m not from California, and I’m not a teen, but this hasn’t been my experience
Here's what look like some real numbers: https://ibew11.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Residential-wa...
Those rates are nothing to sneeze at, but the work is often hard work out in the beating sun (not everybody is installing data centers in air conditioning). And the work takes a toll on your body.
Those are certainly not numbers that would make people genuinely qualified for software jobs think once let alone twice.
> the work takes a toll on your body
It doesn’t need to. Not for welding.
> Not for welding
What? Where? All the welding jobs I have ever known were terrible for your body. Between the exposure to high UV, all the bits of toxic crap that you are breathing/ingesting, and the noise from heavy machinery, it's quite bad. And that's not to mention just the baseline damage from lugging and hauling and hefting heavy pieces of metal.
My grandfather did welding for Bethlehem Steel as did my father. My grandfather died from a weird cancer from all the crap he was exposed to. My father quit working at the mill precisely because it was doing so much damage just by wear and tear. They both made a point to make sure that my job would be based around my brain and not my body.
Electricians, by contrast, at least don't have anywhere near the same level of exposure to toxic crap.
> My grandfather did welding for Bethlehem Steel as did my father
How do they view modern eye, respiratory and skin protection every welder I’ve seen on an industrial site clad in?
Probably the same way they’d view the young tech startup billionaire. They’d understand they’re just seeing snapshots of an industry they don’t fully know so they’d avoid generalizing to “all young tech workers are billionaires”.
Why you’d think you can characterize an entire industry based on a few snapshots is not clear to me.
A few more things I’d add to the health risks of welding: the inevitable toxic crap on the hands even just by taking off the protective equipment, or the occasionally extremely uncomfortable body posture that needs to be maintained for hours on end while welding. And there are more extreme welding environments that put almost any job on earth to shame, like hyperbaric welding.
Over years things add up. If office work is hard on the body for too much sitting which is natural and fine is smaller doses, imagine work where even the small exposures are terribly bad.
Source: only welded once in my life but worked for a company that did a lot of it, from the mountain top to the bottom of the sea. All the safety avoids acute issues but the chronic ones will build up.
So, your hands have no oil or dirt on them after working a welding shift? Wow, I'd love to take a tour of your workplace.
Even if you've got protection on, you still get exposed little by little. If someone is welding next to you on a site, you get exposed. If you have slag, you are breathing vaporized chemicals and heavy metal ions unless you a wearing a closed system breather. Any solvents or fluids tend to be some level of toxic. etc.
Welding is more than just putting rod to metal. You cut things. You grind things. You apply chemicals in preparation. Nobody is dressed in an environmental hazard suit all day--lack of mobility and peripheral vision is its own industrial hazard.
If you're covered in grime at the end of the day, well, all that crap is toxic to some degree.
True, didn’t think about grime like that. I’d be curious to see actual health outcomes comparing the risks of a sedentary occupation with one that has some toxic exposure.
> My grandfather did welding for Bethlehem Steel as did my father.
A company from 1857 that scarcely advanced it's Health & Safety practices.
> And that's not to mention just the baseline damage from lugging and hauling and hefting heavy pieces of metal.
Exactly - modern metal fabrication workers, fitters, turners, machinists, et al use forklifts, overhead cranes, eye protection, breathing rigs that filter out toxins and cool the face, and essentially work smart .. and that's been my experience since I first TA'd in a mining locomotive shed back in the late 1970s.
You can see examples of this in the heavy industry repair domain here:
https://www.youtube.com/@CuttingEdgeEngineering/videos
Erm: https://youtu.be/NZf-fTK7q7E?t=592
Sure, he has eye and ear protection. But he's just inhaling the dust from that stuff.
Even worse, he's using old school stick welding that's actually been banned in multiple places because it was so stupidly toxic.
All your video did was reinforce that, yeah, industrial work looks exactly like what I expect it to look like and it still sucks.
He's descaling with his mouth shut. Not inhaling.
> Even worse, he's using old school stick welding.
Can you show an example of that? (You linked to him using a needle gun not a stick welder)
He's got top of the range spooled feed welders and does jobs at a scale that take hundreds of metres of feed .. these are not the jobs you spend all day swapping sticks for.
If you watched more of the channel you might pick up a lot of discussion about what is and isn't toxic, what are safe and unsafe practices.
The same job | video you linked, different time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZf-fTK7q7E&t=592s
That's gouging out metal wearing a closed system breather as that's actual toxic residue.
Welding a nut on to help separate the metal sleeve - not a stick welder: https://youtu.be/NZf-fTK7q7E?t=438
> All your video did was reinforce that, ...
It honestly seems as if you saw what you wanted to see without paying attention to detail about what was actually happening.
your eyes
tho i guess staring at a screen for 90% of your day is probably also bad for the eyes
Couple this and investing (and having no college debt) and they would be laughing.
Then they can just live off the interest and in 5-10 years think of buying a house instead of renting.
House prices needs to come down and crash though and more housing needs to be built.
"AI" might be the given reason but I feel like this is an expected correction regardless. Ideally people would gravitate towards jobs that match their interests and talents. But our education systems, governments and economies have been pushing more people into thought work even if that's not where their talents lie. This has actually made a lot of the trades very lucrative for the few that remained. Of course, that won't last either, though.
The correction I'm waiting for is the one where we realise we don't need to work twice as many hours as they did a couple of generations ago. Somehow an entire generation was convinced that going to work for someone else was a privilege and working for yourself at home doing cooking, cleaning, maintenance etc was subjugation. A lot of people see the benefit of working for themselves now (they call it "hustling") but still fail to see what's right under their noses as they order the third takeaway of the week.
But shortages of necessities are used to ensure that peer competition remains stiff enough to keep us outbidding each other for housing, etc necessitating optimizing for income, necessitating working more hours, for all but a lucky few.
[dead]